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COPS undergoes major software upgrade

Williamstown, NJ--COPS Monitoring, a large third-party central station, has completed a $125,000 software upgrade, which will allow the company to expand its current central station capabilities and improve overall operations.
"This upgrade allows us to push the envelop with what we're offering and get into new solutions that we're seeing come down the pike," said Don Maden, executive vice president of COPS. "A lot of that is of course video and GPS, but also different ways to handle IP alarms as well as interface with other people who provide IP-based solutions."
COPS, which uses a proprietary automation software platform, migrated from a previous version of RainingData's software to its D3 Database Management system. The upgrade was done in stages over a 45-day period, Maden said.
"The software was built from the ground up," he said. "As with many software migrations, the commands are different, but it was pretty much a seamless transition because it was the same company. It wasn't like we migrated from company A to company B, it's just a different flavor of the software."
One benefit of the upgrade is the improvement of overall efficiency for both operators and dealers. "We've spent a lot of energy developing ways to reduce key strokes in operations as well as devise solutions to benefit the dealer. Because we have a Web-based solution ... dealers are doing more and more account-based management themselves," Maden said.
Concurrently, the software allows multiple people to utilize the same customer information at the same time without allowing records to be overridden, he said. "You can have reports running, accounts being edited, alarms being processed and dealers doing their database work" all at the same time, he said.
Despite the additional benefits, Maden said the upgrade didn't require significant training for operators or dealers since "the interfaces were all the same." The only training necessary was for programmers, which Maden said is another major benefit of the upgrade.
"It gives us a competitive advantage with respect to programming because the coding gets simplified for our programmers, so productivity goes up and we're able to deliver new applications," he said.